Got a call from our agent yesterday saying the carrier for our home owners was no longer going to insure. It was hard enough finding insurance to begin with since our house is an OLD farm house that no company wants to insure because it is on rock pillars and not a full block foundation and while we are within 3 miles of a fire station there is no fire hydrant located near by. Just a few of the excuses given.
Considering how the agent talked I have a feeling it is going to be a bend over and grab the ankles time.
Similar, just as bad. This is an old owner-built non-code farmhouse on a pier and post foundation.
California has a last-resort insurance pool, expensive. But the house has to meed code to qualify for it. Lacking a perimeter foundation in earthquake country, I'm miles from qualifying. Then there's the knob and tube wiring with Federal Pacific breakers (famous for fires). And I'm 10 miles downwind from the most expensive fire in California history, it ran for miles. You get the picture.
When my big insurance company took huge losses on the recent large California fires they left California. My agent had no advice. A neighbor who had insured a similar old house referred me to his agent, who referred me to another, who sent me to a third.
That third guy said you're probably going to hang up on me
but insuring in the category of old mobile homes in a junky old mobile home park is the only way you are going to get the liability insurance you need, along with some $100k of fire insurance on the house and barns. Ok, whatever. Better to have an attorney between me and someone sueing me after falling out of a tree. I still needed liability insurance, separately, for the commercial apple orchard.
Total cost is now some 5x what I was paying before those major fires. Times are strange ...
